Leaving Las Vegas

This particular entry of IN PLAY LOSE was particularly difficult to write, even though I've tried to approach it with my usual absurdist intellectual bent. I am not in the mood to argue. So don't argue with me.

Since the LOSE was venturing to the losingest city on earth to play in the National Scrabble Championships, the results seemed almost appropriate. Las Vegas is a place where people lose like no other. They lose their money, their good sense, their inhibitions. It’s a vortex of a place, albeit a beautiful one for someone like me who loves architecture, design, and the art of the man-made world. Las Vegas at night really is gorgeous. I hadn’t been there in about 20 years all told. All places change over 20 years, but Vegas has changed 100 times over, a city that constantly tweaks and reinvents itself, looking to be everything for everybody and sometimes succeeding.

Before I talk about how I did, I should also point out that my opponents played very, very well. As the epigram of IN PLAY LOSE points out, no competitions are acts of solitaire. Whatever objectives you have are countered by the other side’s. There necessarily has to be a loser. Losing is, in fact, the default setting and you do all you can to avoid it. But sometimes you don’t do enough, and sometimes the other persons do more.

My biggest problem as a scrabble player is the same problem I’ve had with every other competitive activity that I’ve undertaken, which is that I’m streaky and maddeningly inconsistent. I’m your classic NBA swingman who averages 14 pts. a game – he scores 26 in one game and can’t miss, then scores 2 the next and looks completely lost and out of his element on the court. I’ve picked up, and given up, a litany of sports in my lifetime in which I had a natural aptitude but became SO DAMN FRUSTRATED with my inability to do them consistently well. Tennis immediately comes to mind. Golf is maybe a better example: I still remember teeing off on the 1st hole at my uncle’s charity golf tournament, having played maybe 10 rounds of golf in my life and having been added to field simply because they were short a player, and, in front of all those gathered, promptly unleashing a 305-yard drive in the dead center of the fairway that drew “oohs” and “aahs” and the odd “damn, I wish he was on my team” from the other players.

My drive off the second tee went 30 yards and killed a few worms.

I run hot and cold. More like Saharan and Antarctic. When things go well for me, they go really well. And when they don’t … you get the 2013 National Scrabble Championships in Las Vegas, which went as bad as tournament I’ve ever been a part of. In some ways, it was even worse than the 2009 tourney in Albuquerque where I went 1-17, simply because so much was at stake in Las Vegas, and to have such a dreadful tourney at a crucial time feels like a cruel twist of fate. People have attempted to comfort me by saying that this is part of the game, that bad tournaments just happen from time to time, but no one I know, at my level of the game, seems to have tournaments as bad I do. I would venture to say, in fact, that a good number of players, if subjected to the sorts of truly wretched outcomes I’ve had to endure, would have the same impulse – which is to quit.

It didn’t help that I was not in a good mindset going into the tournament. For a number of reasons I don’t want to go into, it hasn’t been a very good summer. It’s been a high-cost, high-stress, low-reward sort of summer. I frequently tell people that “if I get mad about scrabble, it’s not scrabble that is making me mad.” I need to have the proper sort of attitude to compete at a high level. I can’t just turn it on and off. I am not someone with deep, intense focus who can just block everything out. Things that affect me away from the board affect me over it. I’m not sure what the solution to this is.

One thing I am happy to report is a solution for a problem that came to the forefront on the third day of the tourney, when I realized that I couldn't read the board. This has been a developing issue here in 2013, and I've been dealing with it by sort of very quietly asking KC to read the menu to me whenever we go to a restaurant. Fortunately, my good pal David Whitley had an extra pair of reading glasses which he gave to me, and they make a big difference. I cannot attribute poor performance at scrabble to poor eyesight, but I doubt that it's helped. And for the rest of the tournament, at least I wasn't flying blind.

The game hasn’t been going very well lately – I’ve been in a steady slide ever since New Orleans and have lost some of my interest in playing. Deep down, I really didn’t want to play. There were times in recent weeks where I thought seriously about withdrawing from the tourney, simply because I was residing in such a terrible headspace and feeling like a bad tourney would be almost too much for me to handle upstairs.

Well, the time is here to handle it, I guess.

How does this happen? Well, obviously, I played terrible. My game obviously isn’t well-rounded enough to figure out how to get out some situations. This is easy to see in hindsight – but in the moment, of course, it’s utterly confounding. Everything is dependent upon making what seems like the right play – and when the move promptly blows up in your face, as you’ve just given your opponent a place to play their 80-point bingo and you’ve drawn IOUUV out of the bag, and this happens over and over again, you just wondering why the hell you’re even bothering. You can no longer tell the difference between a good play that didn't work and a bad one which was doomed from the start. The concept of the Threshold of Misery is important here – when it’s going real bad, the frustration multiplies exponentially and you reach the point where you’re no longer feeling as if you’re playing a game, but are simply hoping that some miracle will fall from the sky. That doesn’t end well. Trust me, I know.

There are three basic types of losses in competitive scrabble:

1) you make big mistakes
2) your opponent plays better than you
3) you draw poor tiles and have no real shot.

Most scrabblers I know respond to these in the corresponding ways:

1) “I can’t believe I played like an idiot! I’m so mad!”
2) “Well, (s)he made the plays. *Tip cap* They’re still a lucky bastard.”
3) *shrug* “Not much I could do about that one.”

I respond like this:

1) “OK, I won’t make that mistake again. I can learn from this.”
2) see response to #2 above
3) “I HATE THIS FUCKING GAME!!!! WHAT A FUCKING WASTE OF MY TIME!!!!!”

Most players hate the first type of loss. I hate the third. Perhaps I need to have my therapist explain to me why it is that such a loss of any sense of control affects me so much. There are probably some deep-seeded insecurity issues there. But whatever. This isn’t a self-help blog. The point is that all of the losses mentioned above happen, and they don’t necessarily occur in proportion. We call the third loss being “bagged,” and in Las Vegas I got bagged over and over and over again, to the point where I felt like I was watching my opponents play solitaire and absolutely nothing I was doing was making any difference in the outcome of the game. In theory, not only will you get bagged from time to time, but you’ll also do the bagging. I had one of those in my favour. (I would’ve had a second game with a lopsided scoreline in my favour, except that I just wanted to get the game over with, and didn’t look for any big plays at the end, because my opponent was miserable to the point of unpleasant and I just wanted to get away from him. But we’ll get into the concept of being a miserable opponent here in a minute.)

The third type of loss is primarily due to luck. Some of the tiles are good, and some are bad, and you’ll draw some of each over time. The standard line people like to spout is that “luck evens out.” The standard line is nonsense. Sure, over the course of 25,000 games I’ve played in the past 10 years, the tiles have probably evened out. But I haven’t played 25,000 games in the past 10 years at the National Scrabble Championships in Las Vegas. The bag of tiles has no memory and no sense of place. It could be in Las Vegas or on my livingroom table. Luck is not a mathematical or rational construct. It is a metaphorical one. And this is why we must fear metaphor – the greater symbolic value we attach to something, the greater the disappointment if it doesn’t turn out. And when you slap a label like “national championship” on a tournament, the metaphors run wild, the disappointment at a lack of success compounds, and it’s easy to feel like you’re just getting hosed repeatedly.

And when it comes to metaphor, I embrace too easily that which I should fear. I’m someone who makes metaphors out of everything around me. I have a ridiculously logical and rational mind coupled with the eye and the voice of a poet. Rarely does A=A to me. Often times, A=B and A=C. Should I see the world this way? Almost certainly not. It makes for an aptitude when it comes to literature (where the ability to render A=B is paramount), but also makes for a propensity to attach far too much meaning to events. This is particularly true of negative ones, since failure is complex and multifaceted. Why do you succeed? Well, you did what you were supposed to do! Why do you fail? Hmmm, it’s complicated … I was always naturally good at scrabble, the mechanics and mathematics and spatial awareness seeming to suit one area of my particular skillset. Unfortunately, the part where random chance comes into play drives me fucking mad as hatters. It sort of makes me wonder, in hindsight, why it is that I bother to play at all, given that the game has a rather large component of random chance which seems almost destined to make me crazy.

And I went crazy in Las Vegas. It almost killed me – and I’m dead serious when I say that. I very nearly had a nervous breakdown. I did manage to only break one pen somehow, and I probably would have smashed all of my equipment to smithereens if given the opportunity. The losses mounted and the frustration gathered and finally I reached the point where I just felt completely numb. I was zombified by the last day of the tourney. After the fact, I’m very rational about why I lost, and can look at outcomes with the appropriate amounts of humour and absurdity, but in the moment it eats me up inside.

I hated this tournament. I hated every minute of it. And right now I hate scrabble – but I hate the player and not the game.

I have no doubt that my girlfriend’s performance in the tournament was significantly and negatively impacted by the fact that she had to put up with me. I hate knowing that to be true. It’s absolutely unacceptable to me, as a person, to be causing such difficulties for someone who loves and cares about me. I was sullen, I was moody, I was smoking and was needing to be drunk all the time, I was uncoöperative and unresponsive. I was the sort of opponent people loathe to play against – the sort who stews in their own misery every time something goes wrong. In short, I was an absolutely TERRIBLE human being to be around for 5 days. Now, my friends all know that I’m ultracompetitive and that my frustration when I lose is all in the moment and my usual good humour will soon return, so they know not to take how I act to heart – but that shouldn’t even matter.

The bottom line is that I hate the way the game makes me feel.

And I really shouldn’t be partaking in any activities that do so. And now that one long weekend in Vegas has essentially managed to undo all that I’ve strived to accomplish and achieve in the game over the past five years (yes, it really was that bad a tourney), I need a break.

I threaten to quit scrabble all the time, but never do, and I’m not going to now either, even though saying “I Quit” aloud repeatedly in Las Vegas was about the only source of comfort and relief after awhile. I’ve managed to become so involved in the game on administrative and managerial levels that detangling myself from all of that is nearly impossible. And I still enjoy that aspect of the game, so I’ll run the tourney in San Francisco this fall and be involved on that level. I just need to not play for a while and focus my attention on doing something else – writing novels and telling stories, working on art projects and cookbooks and practicing mixology. But I need a hiatus from the game. It needs to become fun again, and stop being a soul-sucking vacuum.

The worst mistake I have made playing scrabble is defining myself by the results of the activity. That’s a somewhat natural reaction, however – the game offers so little in terms of tangible rewards that all you can really strive to do is achieve your own personal expectations and meet your own standards. I have ridiculously high expectations for myself in terms of wins and losses, but having the goal of not losing my mind should be easy enough to attain. I can do better than this, win or lose.

Caro's Threshold of Misery

The LOSE has been busy here of late, cranking out a magazine at the office and writing up a draft of a new novel. But the LOSE took time out to travel to Las Vegas, where I participated in the National Scrabble Championships. And as resistant as I am to the idea, I will be a dutiful reporter here and go into some sort of detail about this tournament here in the coming days.

But before I do that, it's important to bring a concept into play here which was all of my gambler friends know about. This is a snippet from Mike Caro's "Threshold of Misery" theory, which I vaguely knew of in the past and was then reintroduced to by my good pal Jason Hlady up in Saskatchewan after I had a truly dreadful tournament in Albuquerque in 2009:

Few concepts have resonated with students more than Caro's Threshold of Misery. I continually receive letters, e-mails, and face to face thanks from both poker players and people in the "real world", telling me how much this simple truth has meant to them.

Here's how it goes: suppose you're a small to medium limit player, and you can envision yourself comfortably losing a maximum of $1,500 today. I'm not suggesting that you'll be happy about losing that much, just that you can comfortably handle it and that anything more will begin to feel uncomfortable.

Okay, now you find yourself down $500, then $1,100, then--before it registers, you've zoomed past $1,500 and are losing $1,800. You've entered dangerous territory. And it gets worse. And worse. Hours later, you find yourself losing $4,530. Now, your mind is numb. I believe that most people at this point can't mentally comprehend added losses. It all feels the same. You've crossed into Caro's Threshold of Misery, which is the point where mental and emotional pain is maximized and anything further won't register.
 
You must be aware when you cross that threshold, because beyond it decisions don't seem to matter. This is true in real life, too. When romances unravel or businesses fail, you might cross the Threshold of Misery and stop caring about making critical decisions. That's because the pain is already maximized and anything else that goes wrong can't add to the agony ... at these times, in poker and in life, the secret is to keep performing like you care.

How'd I do in Vegas? Well, I wouldn't be explaining the threshold of misery theory if it went well, now would I? This blog is intended to be an act of somewhat creative nonfiction, because truth is stranger than fiction. And I couldn't have invented this tournament in my head if I tried.

A Giant Inferno

"If you're going through hell, keep going."
– Winston Churchill

On May 12, at Pacific Bell SBC AT&T Phone Co. Park, the 2012 World Series Champion San Francisco Giants defeated the Atlanta Barves Braves 5-1. The Giants were 23-15 at the time, atop the NL West Standings and had just finished winning three straight from the NL East leading Barves Braves by an aggregate of 23-4.

And then this happened:

After today’s 7-2 home loss to the New York Mets, which completed a sweep by the Mets, the Giants now stand at 40-50, meaning they are 17-35 since the 12th of May. Some of that has been due to some bad timing with the schedule – the Giants have had a series of long road trips after the schedule was frontloaded with homestands – but they’ve also managed to lose three of four at home to the Miami Marlins and get swept by the aforementioned Mets, a team consisting of about four guys you would actually want and 21 guys I’ve never heard of. I think the season reached an absurd new low on Monday night when the Giants lost to the Mets 4-3 in 16 innings, leaving 18 men on base (11 in extra innings) and batting 1-for-15 with runners in scoring position.

[Side note: thanks to good pal Diane over at Value Over Replacement Grit for answering my query on the absurd number of extra inning games the Mets have been playing this year. The VORG is an official Friend of The Lose, or FTL, because we wouldn’t want any FTW going on around here, and you should read Diane's blog all the time.]

On May 14, the Giants ventured to Toronto for two games at The SkyDome (and I don’t give a shit what it’s called now, it’s still the SkyDome) against the last-place Jays, and the Giants got shellacked 10-6 and 11-3 and it’s been a free fall ever since. So my first instinct here is to blame Canada for the Giants miseries. Surely this is Canada’s fault. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO OUR TEAM?!?!?!? Except I really like Canada, have many friends there, speak excellent Canadian, and appreciate the fact that our northern neighbours are both extremely mellow and secretly badass. And that was 50 games ago, so surely the Giants should’ve gotten their shit together by now.

No, it’s not Canada’s fault. As the Official Girlfriend of IN PLAY LOSE just said from across the room, upon hearing what I was writing about, “it is with heavy heart that we regret to inform you that our team sucks.”

It’s really tough to watch this happening. The Giants won the World Series in 2010 and 2012, and the 2011 team, while being offensively inept and dreadfully boring, still managed to win 86 games and be in the race most of the year. And after a great start to this season, they’ve completely gone off a cliff. This can happen sometimes to veteran teams, of course, who can seemingly get collectively old and slow all at once. The 2001 Mariners won the most games in American League history, the 2002 and 2003 teams were among the best teams in baseball history not to make the playoffs … aaand then, in 2004, they were in last. They were old, slow, couldn’t hit nor field, and a good number of their longtime vets had outlived their usefulness.

Thing is though, the Giants aren’t really that old. Many of their best players are in their mid- to late 20s. Having made a whole bunch of terrible free agent decisions in the aftermath of the Barry Bonds era, the Giants have instead been living off a steady diet of serviceable veterans on short-term contracts while developing their own young players. The bulk of this team’s core is home grown talent they’ve now been hurrying to sign to long-term deals so as not to have to deal with free agency issues at all in the future. They made it a point to keep the majority of the 2012 team intact, and with good reason – they just won the World Series, for cripesake! But suddenly, the core seems to have just completely rotted out. Something is rotten in the proverbial Denmark. (Even more rotten than in the real Denmark, which doesn’t seem possible).

OK, so what the hell is going on here?

The Giants have had an absurd number of injuries, for starters, many of them in bunches and a number of them weird. Pitcher Ryan Vogelsong was pitching a shutout when he broke his hand batting; CF and leadoff man Angel Pagan may have done the remarkable in a rare Giants win, but he also apparently injured his leg severely on what was the most exciting play of the season, and he is now basically shelved for the year. NLDS MVP Marco Scutaro was hitting .330 again – remarkable for his age – then he broke a finger so badly that it’s now bent at an angle. He’s trying to play through it, amazingly. Broken fingers, strained feet, appendicitis, cyst removals from swollen knees – you name it, this team has been a M*A*S*H unit. But bad teams always have lots of injuries. Every team has some injury issues during a season, but bad teams suffer because there isn’t enough depth of talent to play through it and be successful.

The offense has gone into a complete tailspin here of late, lacking any sort of continuity and having guys come back from injury too quickly who clearly aren’t effective. But early in the season, the offense was carrying this team – which should be a red flag, because Phone Co. Park is the most pitcher-friendly park in baseball and any good offensive stats will tend to regress. The Giants will only win if they pitch well.

And therein lies the biggest problem: the Giants CAN’T PITCH. They haven’t worth a damn all season, but were bailed out early on by a string of improbable late game heroics, as the Giants pulled off one surprising comeback after another in the late innings. The team that threw four shutouts in their last 7 postseason games of 2012 – all wins – now has one effective starter (Madison Bumgarner) and a really good LHP setup guy and closer who never get in the games because they’re losing all the time. Matt Cain, the ace, followed up giving up 7 runs in 3 innings on Friday by lasting .2 of an inning today. Tim Lincecum, who found his form in the playoffs in the bullpen, and playoff hero Barry Zito are both rarely able to get out of the 5th inning these days, which means the bullpen is constantly taxed, guys are all out of sync, and everything’s a mess. Now the defense, which was so slick in the World Series, has started to come apart. The offense is wheezing. Even manager Bruce Bochy seems to be losing his Midas touch. They're inventing new ways to screw things up.

And there aren’t any good solutions. Their minor league system is iffy, so it’s hard to make deals. Conversely, they don’t really have a lot of guys a playoff contender would want (save for RF/fan favourite/weirdo Hunter Pence, who actually referenced that Churchill quote for the media last weekend), so trying to restock through deadline day deals isn’t really going to work. They’ll have some money to spend in the offseason, as the collective $40 million their paying to Zito and Lincecum comes off the books, but the Giants aren’t big players in free agency anymore. Their m.o. in the championship years has been to add on to good rosters throughout the season by fleecing the Marlins and Réal Ciudad Kansas through a series of trades and other acquisitions. There isn’t any point in going that route when you’re 10 games under .500 at the all-star break. The cupboard is far from bare, of course – Buster Posey is a good start, Matt Cain won't suck forever, Brandon Crawford will remember how to field, etc. – but there are some serious decisions to be made about the future of this team. And in the meantime, the slog continues.

The Giants have been a source of joy for us in recent years. On Oct. 1, 2010, I lost my job, but three days later I was caring far less about that and far more about the fact that the Giants had beaten the Padres on the last day of the season to clinch the division. Watching them proceed from there to win a World Series brought a joy and happiness that was a most welcome distraction in an otherwise terrible time. “Who cares if I don’t have a job? It’s 80° out and there’s a World Series victory parade!” Watching them go through this abysmal death march of a 2-month stretch has been extremely discouraging. The city that lives and dies with this team and sells out every game has been mired in an interminable hangover without the benefits one gets from of a few stiff drinks.

But I know that you cannot win every year. Admittedly, we’re a little spoiled here at the moment – two championships in three years is pretty remarkable, especially since they’d not won one since 1954. We Giants fans were becoming perilously close to being those annoying, irritating types who gloat constantly because their team wins all the time.

That would’ve been kinda awesome if that happened, wouldn’t it?

Hero(es) of the Week

Today the airport unit of the San Francisco Fire Department was pressed into service as first responders for one of the most unimaginably awful reasons – a Boeing 777 coming up short on its approach to the runway, smacking its tail first (which then separated from the rest of the body of the plane), spinning round and ultimately skidding to a stop as the fuselage became engulfed in fire. It's a terrible tragedy – 2 persons lost their lives in the crash and 49 were seriously injured – but it's also a damn miracle, as there were 307 people on the plane altogether.

I'm not that far off when I say this happened in my backyard – we live 15 minutes from SFO, and we're basically the emergency aeroport shuttle for all of our friends who miss connecting flights, get stranded in bad weather, oversleep, are too hungover to fly, etc. This was a soul-shaking sort of event today, since air travel in this country has become so safe that you almost take it for granted – there hadn't been a major commercial aeroline accident at SFO since 1968, and there hadn't been one which was fatal since something like 1953. This just doesn't happen. You simply cannot believe a jetliner has crashed. You cannot believe that it is real.

And I just wanted to take this time to thank those first responders, who are the true heroes of every week. I live 2 blocks from S.F.F.D. Engine Co. #7, and the engines have a tendency to go revving thru the neighbourhood with sirens blaring at all times of day, which can be annoying. But the men and women of Engine Co. #7 also nearly collectively killed themselves (and I mean that in all seriousness, as several were injured) working in the middle of the night back in Sep. 2005 while fighting an inferno next door – a slum tenement not up to code which was gutted by a fire that nearly took all of the surrounding homes down with it, including mine. They very likely saved our house that night, and all of us who live in this neighbourhood were left standing helpless in the middle of the street, watching the fire crews work and hoping it would turn out OK. I will always be grateful for that. It was a horrific night I have since had the odd nightmare about – there were multiple fatalities among the residents of that building – and yet it could have been so, so much worse.

So I love the S.F.F.D., and their efforts at keeping people safe in this city never go unnoticed by me. They truly are The Good Guys and they are my Heroes For the Week – and pretty much every week, for that matter. A lot of people didn't lose today at SFO, in part, because of their efforts. But my heart goes out to the families whose loved one were lost or wounded. There are no words.

The LOSE has been on hiatus here, mired in deadline pressures and such at the office. We'll be back talking about silly games and such here in the near future. In the meantime, I need to write these damn articles. Nertz.